Oh. My. God. This is exactly the thread I've been waiting for since I joined the boards. I'll be right back, gotta grab my books.

EDIT: Okay, I'm back. The whole "race" thing is actually the simple part, and I just so happen to be an expert.

First first, let's get one thing straight: homebrew is almost invariably worse than stats printed by WotC (with a few major exceptions (Locate City Bomb, Pun-Pun, I'm looking at you guys)). If you can find stats in the books, use those first. If you can't find them in books, try the PDFs of the back issues of WotC's old 3.5 mags, Dragon and Dungeon. Then, and only then, so you ask your four buddies for help. Because one person working alone probably won't make something balanced.

Games are srs bsns.

Actual first now, let's start with Keidran, seeing as they're the hardest. There's several different subraces, and each is slightly different from the next, so you can't just use the same stats for each one (I mean, you can, but that's lame, so let's do it better). To my recollection, there's been five subraces of keidran shown so far (six if you count Kathrin, our resident GMO kitty); tiger, wolf, dog, fox, and cat.

Immediately, there's a simple solution at hand: Anthropomorphic races, as detailed in the book Savage Species (SS) in appendix 3, page 215. Stats are outlined for races corresponding to every animal outlined in chapter 2 of the Monster Manual I (MMI), including tiger, wolf, two kinds of dog (the smaller of which can sub in for the sadly lacking fox), and a cat. However, these are all terribly bland! No pictures, no description, no racial weapons... nothing else pre-made for us. Granted, you could always homebrew some weapon stats, or just repaint some premade ones, but that sounds like work. Not to mention that most of these have prohibitive ECLs (effective character levels), making the majority of these races garbage.

Let's make WotC work for us. Dig a little deeper, and see if we can't find anything that works a little better, huh? Flora's always a fan favorite, so we'll start with tigers. Always first place to look is the MMI -easily the most abundant location of humanoid and humanoid-like races. There's rakshasa, but they have mad superpowers and weird hands, so that's out. Looks like that's it for MMI. Maybe somewhere else.

In 2004-05, WotC published a series of books focusing on various races of various climes, known as the Races of... series. The layout was simple: add buttloads of flavor to two of the comon races, introduce a third, and then provide lots of build options for all three. They also included a chapter (frequently chapter 4) in which they introduced a smattering of other races. It's in this chapter of Races of the Wild (RotW) that we find the catfolk on page 92. Here we find flavor (to be kept or whitewashed at your discretion), individualized stats (actually more playable than the anthro tiger from SS), and even sample names. If that's not awesome, I don't know what is.

Next, wolves. Interestingly, in the very same book (RotW), we can find the stats for gnolls (also statted in MMI, but there's more flavor here) on page 99. Again, you'll find that these guys are more playable than the anthro wolf (although no trip attack, but you win some you lose some).

Finally, cats and dogs. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything terribly fitting for these guys (though I'll be sure to make an edit to this post if I do). Fortunately, the cat isn't garbage, and the dogs... aren't complete garbage. Sorry Mike and Evals.

After that, we have basitins to stat out. Finally, something easy! There is one race that is reknown in DnD for being xenophobic, militaristic, excellent strategists, and not having a buttload of wizards: hobgoblins, statted out in MMI, page 153. They even kinda look like basitins. And while they're pretty well painted in the MMI to be evil, we can always whitewash that.

That's the races. If anybody would like the stats for any of the races listed here, just send me a quick PM and I'll be happy to divulge said information. Tomorrow, I'll do some work on magic and NPCs, which, unfortunately, will require some homebrew. Until then, have fun with this.

Researched entirely in hardcover.

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Picking up where Twippit left off (good research by the way) the biggest problem I'm seeing is having to deal with level adjustment. Again, this is where I hold up Pathfinder as the better 3.X option since they reworked a lot of the old races to remove level adjustments as best they could and still keep the races balanced plus the addition of alternate racial features that can be easily swapped in and out. Gnoll, Hobgoblins, and Catfolk can all be found in Advanced Race Guide plus one other race that could be adjusted to work for fox Keidran.

Catfolk (ARG pg. 90): Inquisitive, extroverted, and always on the move. This race is perfect to be adapted into felid Keidran.

Hobgoblins (ARG pg. 120): I'll admit I was banging my head against a wall for a short while trying to build the Basitins from scratch when I should have been reading the entire guide. Alter the physical and societal descriptions, change the standard racial trait to Battle-Hardened instead of Sneaky, change Darkvision into Low-light vision and add in lesser spell resistance and you've got a one-to-one with our beloved fuzzy Klingons.

Gnoll (ARG pg. 225): Unfortunately Paizo didn't do a much better job that WotC here. Gnolls here aren't expanded on but used to demonstrate the race building system that Pathfinder has. Still, being functionally identical without level adjustment is a good thing. Some adjustments could allow the separation of Gnolls into both Wolves and Dogs; Wolves getting xenophobic language trait and a minus to Charisma scores while Dogs don't start with the xenophobia and a lessened Wisdom stat.

Kitsune (ARG pg. 192): This race could work for the foxes with some pretty big adjustments, first and foremost dropping the transformations entirely.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to build a Basitin for my main group. EDIT: I wrote it up in a single night.

My two cents, 'Dark Magic' with the whole 'life leaching' aspects, and the effects therein always struck me as surprisingly similar to Dark Sun, 'Defilers' and the rather substantial number of items and abilities attributed to them. It might be worth giving it a glance if you ever plan to incorporate that sort of thing, the material is rather easy to convert, I can throw you a few PDFs if your interested.

Schrodinger wrote:Picking up where Twippit left off (good research by the way) the biggest problem I'm seeing is having to deal with level adjustment. Again, this is where I hold up Pathfinder as the better 3.X option since they reworked a lot of the old races to remove level adjustments as best they could and still keep the races balanced plus the addition of alternate racial features that can be easily swapped in and out.

Thank you. Frankly, I'd rather defer to you when it comes to PF, as you seem to have a better idea of where things are in that system. I think I'll stick to building in 3.5, because it's what I'm more comfortable with.

Where did I leave off last time?

Twippit wrote:I'll do some work on magic and NPCs, which, unfortunately, will require some homebrew

Oh yeah, that. That's complicated, but here's some spitball for now.

First, some context: In DnD, spells come in nine (technically ten) different levels of power, which, confusingly enough, isn't congruent with character levels (and not every spellcasting class has access to all nine levels, and 0-level spells are called different things for each class that has them... It gets confusing).

Got that?

Good, me neither. Moving on.

In Twokinds, (by my best recollection, mind, which is certainly not the best (it's been a hot minute since I've read the whole archive)) magic works through mystical "life energy," or mana. One can drain oneself of mana for a normal spell, or supercharge a spell by draining the life energy of oneself and the things around oneself, at the cost of permanent damage to oneself. To me, this sounds like constitution drain. One point of Con per power lever of spell? I'm not sure. Thoughts from any of you more well-versed in the comics than I?

Gooood evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Stereolabs! I'm your host, DJ Doc Connors, and you can listen to me live on Fridays from 5-7 PT at ktec895.com! If you want to place a request for a song or a shout-out, you can put it in my thread, here!

Twippit wrote:I'll do some work on magic and NPCs, which, unfortunately, will require some homebrew

Oh yeah, that. That's complicated, but here's some spitball for now.

First, some context: In DnD, spells come in nine (technically ten) different levels of power, which, confusingly enough, isn't congruent with character levels (and not every spellcasting class has access to all nine levels, and 0-level spells are called different things for each class that has them... It gets confusing).

Got that?

Good, me neither. Moving on.

In Twokinds, (by my best recollection, mind, which is certainly not the best (it's been a hot minute since I've read the whole archive)) magic works through mystical "life energy," or mana. One can drain oneself of mana for a normal spell, or supercharge a spell by draining the life energy of oneself and the things around oneself, at the cost of permanent damage to oneself. To me, this sounds like constitution drain. One point of Con per power lever of spell? I'm not sure. Thoughts from any of you more well-versed in the comics than I?

Constitution penalties would work in some cases while in others a mental stat drain could be applied, in Natani's case she would have been afflicted with either a Wisdom or Charisma drain rendering him catatonic. Vehra, by the same token, lobotomized herself with magic so she suffers an Intelligence drain. This isn't including physical deformities (Trace) or insanity (Alabaster).

Twippit wrote:I'll do some work on magic and NPCs, which, unfortunately, will require some homebrew

Oh yeah, that. That's complicated, but here's some spitball for now.

First, some context: In DnD, spells come in nine (technically ten) different levels of power, which, confusingly enough, isn't congruent with character levels (and not every spellcasting class has access to all nine levels, and 0-level spells are called different things for each class that has them... It gets confusing).

Got that?

Good, me neither. Moving on.

In Twokinds, (by my best recollection, mind, which is certainly not the best (it's been a hot minute since I've read the whole archive)) magic works through mystical "life energy," or mana. One can drain oneself of mana for a normal spell, or supercharge a spell by draining the life energy of oneself and the things around oneself, at the cost of permanent damage to oneself. To me, this sounds like constitution drain. One point of Con per power lever of spell? I'm not sure. Thoughts from any of you more well-versed in the comics than I?

Constitution penalties would work in some cases while in others a mental stat drain could be applied, in Natani's case she would have been afflicted with either a Wisdom or Charisma drain rendering him catatonic. Vehra, by the same token, lobotomized herself with magic so she suffers an Intelligence drain. This isn't including physical deformities (Trace) or insanity (Alabaster).

That's right, magic works differently for the different races because why not make this even more complicated than it is.

Right then, so Humans have Con drain, Keidrans have Wis drain, and Basitins have Int drain. I need to work out a system for this.

Gooood evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Stereolabs! I'm your host, DJ Doc Connors, and you can listen to me live on Fridays from 5-7 PT at ktec895.com! If you want to place a request for a song or a shout-out, you can put it in my thread, here!

Twippit wrote:That's right, magic works differently for the different races because why not make this even more complicated than it is.

Right then, so Humans have Con drain, Keidrans have Wis drain, and Basitins have Int drain. I need to work out a system for this.

I still need to work out the system... but I need someone more well-versed in the comic to help out. Any volunteers?

Gooood evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Stereolabs! I'm your host, DJ Doc Connors, and you can listen to me live on Fridays from 5-7 PT at ktec895.com! If you want to place a request for a song or a shout-out, you can put it in my thread, here!

Schrodinger wrote:I know the system well enough. But stat drain is something I haven't dealt with.

I'll send you a PM.

Gooood evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Stereolabs! I'm your host, DJ Doc Connors, and you can listen to me live on Fridays from 5-7 PT at ktec895.com! If you want to place a request for a song or a shout-out, you can put it in my thread, here!

So I've been playing the crap out of Pathfinder over the last year, and I mainly GM. I've happened to take interest in the thread, and who knows, if I find time I might actually host something (although, this is unlikely because I'm hosting like 5 campaigns already, but that's what I said the last 4 times anyways.)

The suggestions I'm about to give are more in line with the lore of the universe as opposed to game balance, but I'll try my best.

Races: For those who don't know, typically races in pathfinder get +2 to two ability scores (strength, charisma, intelligence) and -2 to another, so I'll try to keep in line with that.

Humans: They work like humans do normally. Yay.

Keidran: Depends what type, although they will have certain things in common:

- Low light vision, I'm assuming that they have this. It's basically just night vision, most animals have it, along with many pathfinder races, so I think that's reasonable.
- Keen Senses: This is a racial trait many races in pathfinder have that have better sight and/or hearing than humans do, such as elves. It give +2 on perception checks.
- Natural attacks, this is stuff like claws and bites. All of them would have a bite and claw attack.
- Feral form, something we haven't seen in the comic for a while. I suppose we could give Keidrans "Ferocity," a thing that orcs and half-orcs have where if they go into low negative hp and instead of going unconscious, they fight on (You only die once hp is equal to or greater than your constitution score.)
- A scent ability

Ability Scores:

Wolves: +2 strength (I remember one scene where Keith gets squeezed by Natani noting her "freakish wolf strength") I don't know what else to add.
Foxes: I'm going to use the ability scores from the Pathfinder Kitsune, so +2 dexterity, +2 charisma, -2 strength
Dogs: I'm going to use the ability scores from the Pathfinder Dog Hengeyokai, so +2 strength, +2 wisdom, -2 dexterity
Tigers: I'm going to use the ability scores from the Pathfinder Catfolk, so +2 dexterity, +2 charisma, -2 wisdom

Basitins:
+2 constitution
+4 on fortitude saves to resist poisons and diseases
Keen senses: They get low light vision and +2 on perception checks.
Military Training: Since all Basitin receive military training, they get a bonus combat feat.

Magic:
Humans: They use magic normally, according to the pathfinder rules.

Basitins: Remember, in the comic it explains that Basitins cannot use magic, or their brain gets really screwed up. So basically, they simply cannot use it. Whether or not they are vulnerable to it's effects, I'm not sure. Research must be done looking into the Basitin Isles arch.

Keidran: So with Keidran, they need mana crystals to use magic. My first thought is this: in pathfinder, magic users need material components to cast their spells. Most of the time, these components consist of really mundane, minor things such as a copper wire or a crickets leg, and some of the spellcaster classes comes with a "spell component pouch" that has the stuff they need to cast stuff. So for Keidran, we can simply assume that they have a spell component pouch with mana crystals instead of crickets legs and other weird stuff. Either that, or they have to buy the crystals, which will kind of suck.

Other Stuff:
So, there are apparently "merfolk" in this world, as referenced on the world map and on a redo-thingy Tom did... I don't remember where I saw it, but it was a redo of a scene from the beginning of the comic where Flora is teaching Trace how to speak Keidran. I'm going to assume these merfolk are simply mermaids, which are already in pathfinder.

Dragon People: If you've kept up with the latest page, there is a human that has started transforming themselves into a dragon, gaining fire powers. I suppose we shall have to wait and see how that goes, but I were to make a race of these people, based on pathfinder dragon stuff, it would be like this:
+2 strength
+1 Natural Armor
+1d6 fire damage upon an unarmed strike
Fire Resistance 5
Darkvision 60ft

The fire element could be replaced by another element if they were supposed to represent another dragon type.

Please give as much feedback and criticism as you can, as this obviously needs work.